If you have goals that you want to achieve, you have to be willing to put in the work. Holding yourself accountable can help you achieve everything you want in life. There are many ways you can hold yourself accountable, but what does accountability even mean?

Holding yourself accountable means that you’re doing all you can to complete your everyday life tasks and life obligations. Accountability requires constant self-reflection and sometimes sacrifices to ensure that you’re completing the tasks you promised you would.

Sometimes our priorities aren’t in the right order, so we fail to complete our goals. Distractions can also prevent you from staying on track as well. Holding yourself accountable will help you lose these distractions, produce better results, achieve your goals, and create a more downtown for you. There are dozens of books on accountability that can help you figure out what specifically is holding you back.

These books will help you do a variety of things, such as…

You’ll learn how to make long- and short-term goals

Long- and short-term goals can be fun to create and can give you something to look forward to. This will give you motivation when you start to hold yourself accountable. Creating long-term goals and short-term goals is the first step in holding yourself accountable because if you have no goal in mind, you have nothing to work towards.

Long-term goals are things that are going to take you a long time to achieve. These are things like graduating college, buying your first house, or getting that work promotion you’ve always wanted. These things are things you can achieve overnight or even over the course of a few months.

Short-term goals are things that can be accomplished in a short amount of time. They’re narrow goals that are extremely specific. For example, if your goal is to purchase a house in five years, maybe your short-term goal is to save an extra hundred dollars a month until you’ve saved an extra thousand dollars that year. Maybe a short-term goal is to pay off your credit card? You can do that in a few months depending on your financial situation and the size of the debt.

Create a timeline for these goals

A timeline is a great way to stay accountable for both your long-term and short-term goals. They help you stay organized and spread the work around over a period of time. This helps make sure you’re not overwhelming yourself by saving on the work until the end.

By setting timelines too, you’ll be forcing yourself to complete certain tasks by a certain time. It’ll also help you feel motivated throughout the entire journey to achieve your goal. For tips for making your timeline to achieve your goals.

Discover what motivates you and make it a reward

Motivation is a powerful tool. It can help us power through tasks with the snap of a finger and achieve our goals at lightning speed. It can be hard to figure out what motivates you at first. It all depends on your goals.

For example, maybe your goal is to lose twenty pounds but you’re finding it increasingly difficult to stay motivated. Give yourself a reward, a nice burger, and fries, a sundae, or a slice of cake once you lose your first five pounds. The same can be said for goals that are business-related.

Let’s say your goal is to send out four emails to four new potential clients a day. You can reward yourself with a snack or a short break once a goal like this is complete. For a long-term goal, like getting that promotion or closing that huge deal you’ve been working on for months, you can give yourself a bigger reward such as a vacation or time off so you can rest and relax.

Learn how to say no

Nothing hurts your productivity more than attempting to do more than you physically can. I’m a yes person. I like to take on a lot of tasks so I can be seen as helpful. I want people to know they can rely on me.

The problem with this is that if you take on too much stuff at once, there’s no way you can hold yourself accountable to complete it all. If you say yes to every project and job and goal that comes your way at once, you’re going to get overwhelmed, unmotivated, and burnt out faster than normal.

If you have multiple goals that you want to accomplish, don’t do them all at once. Choose one to complete at a time. Once you complete your first goal, you can move on to your next one. This will keep you from feeling burnt out at the end of the day.

Pre-plan your day for maximum success

I love my planner. I put in all of my tasks and appointments for the day. It helps me keep track of my schedule and can help remind me of events that I might’ve forgotten about. Planners can also help you keep track of that timeline I was talking about.

You can plan out all of the little tasks that can help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals. This way, you can always make sure you’re working towards your goals and keeping yourself on track. This will help make sure you don’t lose track of your goals and the tasks that will help you achieve them. For more reasons why you should get a planner to improve your productivity, click here.

Change your mindset

Your mindset is one of the biggest obstacles that’s keeping you from achieving your goals. You can’t hold yourself accountable if you’re not prepared mentally or emotionally to make real changes in your life.

Accountability isn’t something that you can achieve without making some serious changes. Sometimes it requires a little bit of sacrifice. If you’re not prepared to do that, then you’re not going to be able to hold yourself accountable.